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It’s No Longer Obamacare — It’s IRScare

Another day, another scandal (or three). Whether the issue is investigating reporters, fumbling Benghazi or harassing Tea Partiers, people across the political spectrum finally are challenging the once-Teflon Obama administration. His groupies in the press are loath to criticize him directly, but the president’s “no drama” public façade is crumbling faster than a Kardashian marriage.

Some in the press compare the scandal tsunami to Watergate while the more daring sort are even breathing the word “impeachment.” The left and the talking heads can say what they want, but let’s hope Republicans avoid the I-word entirely.

Barack Obama isn’t the problem. Progressivism is.

If President Obama retired tomorrow so he could focus on golf, body surfing and autobiographies 3 through 13, would the country immediately transform into a liberty-minded paradise? Of course not.

President Biden (shudder) or another Democrat placeholder would grab the wheel of the sprawling bureaucracy and demand new departments with bigger budgets to better tell citizens how to eat, drink, work, play and pray. Big-government Republicans would jump aboard Uncle Joe’s Choo-Choo Train of Change insisting it’s the only way to prove bipartisan goodwill.

Worse still, the slow-mo train wreck of Obamacare would be chugging down a parallel track, taking out jobs, hospitals and health plans along the way. With or without President Obama, the “Affordable” Care Act can cause significant damage through sheer momentum.

After this president is gone, his legislation remains. And who will enforce it? The deeply unpopular, conservative-profiling, “mistakes were made” Internal Revenue Service. (Yes, I realize that line just signed me up for an audit.)

Obamacare is no longer Obama’s — it belongs to the Beltway bureaucracy. Health and Human Services is still convening committees, sub-committees and sub-sub-committees to convert the 2,400-page law into 20,000+ pages of regulations. Meanwhile, the IRS is staffing up to impose these byzantine requirements on a skeptical public.

The fact is, it’s no longer accurate to call it Obamacare. It is IRScare.

The federal healthcare law demands a bunch of tax hikes, millions in new IRS funding and nearly 2,000 full-time IRS employees to implement. The law requires insurance companies to give the IRS a treasure trove of personal information, including whether or not each citizen has purchased “government approved” health insurance. And if you don’t play ball, the IRS will fine... I mean, tax you for your insolence.

But not to worry—all of your personal, medical, and financial data will be stored in a secure, new government database. The IRS promises they won’t release any of your private information to left-wing groups, the press or the Senate Majority Leader. And they certainly wouldn’t treat you differently if you, say, belong to a Tea Party or write an article like this.

If the federal healthcare law is allowed to stand, its public face will be the IRS. There is little to gain by impeaching a lone politician. What must be impeached is the idea of big government and IRScare.

My last paycheck was $7500 working 12 hours a week online. My sisters friend has been averaging 15k for months now and she works about 20 hours a week. I can't believe how easy it was once I tried it out. The potential with this is endless. This is what I do, Rich4.C0M_

If progressivism is the problem then is conservatism the solution? The very definition of progress is as it says- to "progress" while the word conserve means as it sounds- to "conserve", or to keep things in a static, un-changing state. Nature, time, invention, humanity and politics are not compatible with conservation as it as all things are actually constantly progressing. So thus I fail to see how something that has always and will continue to occur-progress- could possibly be the problem. What is clear is that the GOP is in fact rather conservative and thus seemingly unable to come up with much of any forms of progressive legislation nor able to change in their typical behavior. This latest example is a perfect example of yet again how the GOP is trying their best to use whatever political upset and turn it into a scandal well before all the facts are completely known, all for their own political agendas. As seen on this and other conservative, they are clearly carrying the water on their behalf. And what better way to do so than to bizarrely blend the IRS debacle with Obamacare? Yes- it really doesn't matter "what" the latest story or scandal is so long as it can somehow be construed as yet another supposed failing of Obamacare. Perhaps if the GOP would stop wasting so much time trying to stop a plan that was already passed and deemed constitutional and actually do the jobs they were elected to do- as in actually produce legislation versus simply obstructing progress- we would actually get more done in DC.

President Barack Obama sought to further distance the White House from Jonathan Gruber, the MIT professor who helped craft ObamaCare. Current and former White House and administration officials as well as Democratic leaders in Congress have tried downplay Gruber's role in light of at least six videos that have surfaced in the last several days.

The White House is trying to downplay yet another ObamaCare scandal by calling Jonathan Gruber, the architect of the law, a liar. In a statement provided to a leftist blog, a White House spokesperson disputed the MIT economist's October 2013 comment that the designed lack of transparency in ObamaCare was "a huge political advantage" to ram it through Congress.

Another video has surfaced in which Jonathan Gruber insults voters. This time, however, the MIT economist and ObamaCare architect refrained from calling Americans "stupid," though there isn't much of a difference from what he said in previous comments (covered here and here).

Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist who helped the Obama administration craft ObamaCare, is trying to downplay his comments at a October 2013 panel discussion, during which he bragged about the designed "lack of transparency" in the Affordable Care Act and the "stupidity of the American voter."

The Department of Health and Human Services expects ObamaCare enrollments through the federal and state exchanges to come in between 9 million and 9.9 million by the end of 2015, according to CNBC, far lower than the most recent estimate released by the Congressional Budget Office in April of this year:

More than a year after the Obama administration launched the federal ObamaCare exchange, HealthCare.gov, is still giving health insurance companies problems. Though the second open enrollment period is just days away from launching, backend systems that are supposed to communicate with insurers aren't yet finished, according to Politico:

ObamaCare is, once again, headed to the nation's highest court. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments over an IRS rule that granted tax credit subsidies to states that opted not to create an ObamaCare exchange. By granting review, the Supreme Court is going against the wishes of the Obama administration, which had argued that the case, King v. Burwell, should work its way through lower courts:

A majority of HealthCare.gov and state-based exchange users say they don't plan to use the ObamaCare exchanges when the second open enrollment period begins on November 15, according to a survey conducted by BankRate.com. Experts surmise that many consumers who bought health plans on the exchanges will auto-renew, which could mean they'll end up paying more for coverage.

In September 2009, during an interview with a local Fox affiliate, Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) told Coloradans that "[i]f you have an insurance policy you like, doctor or medical facility that provides medical services to you, you'll be able to keep that doctor or that insurance policy." There was no ambiguity in his statement, just the same line that was repeated by President Obama and other Senate Democrats to help sell ObamaCare to a skeptical public.

Young people who have, under the threat of a punitive tax, purchased health insurance coverage on the individual market have seen their premiums skyrocket under ObamaCare. While premiums have increased substantially for everyone, a new study shows that millennials have seen larger increases than their older counterparts: